Ways to make Yom Kippur meaningful for kids

We are Americans living in the former Soviet Union. Our kids attend the Jewish school here, but the community is not religious. The synagogue is an old house and will have about 25-20 men in the sanctuary for Yom Kippur and about 5-10 women in the hallway. I am not terribly comfortable with the synagogue set up. If we take the kids (ages 4,7,10), they will likely spend most of the time in the yard playing with the kids of the two other families that might bring kids, though I don't expect any kids to be the during the day, maybe only for Kol Nidre. My oldest did sit in the sanctuary for most of the Torah service on rosh hashanah.

The kids in my ods's fifth grade are planning to go out together this Saturday. It is very hard to explain to my son why they don't observe Yom Kippur and he does (given that this are all kids at the Jewish school).

I don't know if we'll spend much time at the synagogue or not-- i'd like to if we had a synagogue situaiton that i was more comfortable with-- but I'd like to find a way to make the day meaningful for my kids. They all understand what. Yom Kippur is, but I am looking for some activities to do on the day that would be appropriate. We're not observant, so I'm ok with writing, crafts, etc., if they could help make the holiday different than a regular day for all of us.

Comments (1)

Maybe they could write apology notes to each other (or friends, other family, letters for family abroad, etc) and in the note say how they're not going to make the same mistake again, what they learned from the the mistake, how they can prevent that situation from happening again, etc? I sort of think of YK as a time to make "new year resolutions" after asking for forgiveness for the things I didn't do so well in the previous year. The 4 year old could maybe draw a cartoon strip of something that he did that wasn't great, then you scribe the captions for him.